Month: November 2016

This morning I had a wonderful walk on the beach with the dogs. Unfortunately I don’t have any pics as my phone was on charge. There were great clouds, the tide was out and the dogs went mad. It was great. I even managed to find some booty to use in future paintings.

Beach Booty drying out

I love living by the sea. When I moved down to the south coast of England from London, I never would have imagined how much my life would change. This is where I started to paint. One would think that since I love the sea so much I would actually paint it! Heh! There are loads of reasons why I haven’t, but none worth writing about. Anyhow, I painted a seascape today.

Seascape – Acrylic on Canvas – A4 size

I decided to go back to acrylics for awhile and had prepared some canvases I bought ages ago. I went straight onto the white canvas with sand textured gel and glass bead gel for the beach part and then used a soft gel for the rest. I used ultramarine blue, phthalo blue (green hue), yellow ochre, burnt sienna and titanium white. I used two brushes and a palette knife. I want to use the knife more and have more texture in my paintings. I even used my fingers.

I have put away my watercolors for the time being. I have been staring at an old acrylic painting I did ages ago and wanted to make it better. So I will be working on some smaller pieces and trying out different grounds before I make another mark on it. I have all of this stuff, so I might as well use it!

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I am not a doodler. I don’t have a sketchbook. No, I lie. I have a few, but I don’t really use them. I have tried, but I am not naturally inspired to draw or paint anything. I never did it when I was a child either. I know there are lots of artists who draw things out first, but I am not really one of those. I also don’t plan. I work off of ideas or something that inspires me. Sometimes it works, and sometimes not. Here are a few small pieces that I did recently.

Lavender Fields – Watercolor on Bockingford – Half A4 size

This is a practice piece, but I like it. This is only one wash and took a few minutes, wet on dry.

Squash – Oil pastel on Paper – half A4

I bought some little squashes to paint, but I kept putting it off until now. I wasn’t confident painting them in watercolor, so I got out my oil pastels. For me, this is a doodle. I can use this as a reference for something else if I want to. I am not confident with oil pastels. I think that you have to be really good with drawing and mark making. To be frank, I really don’t know what to do with them and the books I have are a bit traditional. I had loads of cheap pastels, but I sifted through them and gave some to one of my neighbour’s children and the rest to the charity shop. I only have good ones now.

Winter landscape – Watercolor on Bockingford – Half A4 Cropped

I painted this last week, but wasn’t happy with the bottom under the trees, now in the foreground and decided to add trees to the horizon of the sky and make a lake. It looks better, but I will probably try this again on a fresh piece of paper. Sorry about the quality, but my phone doesn’t like the purple and wants to make it blue.

That’s it for now. Happy painting!

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This weekend I worked with the color Purple. Purple is such a fickle color and finding the right one can be tricky. I have some ready mixed ones that range from red tones to blue. I think I might need to work on mixing them. I hear French Ultramarine Blue is very good mixed with Alizarin Crimson.

Working from a suggestion in the book, I painted the above landscape. There is supposed to be a path at the bottom of the page, but it was too dark and didn’t work out, so I am thinkin of cropping it as above. I might even add another line of trees under the sky to make a frozen lake in the middle. The painting should have been more like the one below:

You should just about make out the shadows on the snow. I will probably try this a few more times as I am still not sure about the bottom half of the painting. I do like how the trees and sky turned out though.

Lavender – Half A4 Bockingford

I’m still getting to grips with working with wet on dry and then adding water. These small sketches will make nice cards.

I know the painting below isn’t purple, but I worked with green a couple of weeks ago and made some backgrounds I really liked. This one below was used to paint some rosemary.

Rosemary – Half A4 Bockingford

I’m not sure about this. I really love the background, but not my rosemary. Practice, Practice, Practice. 🙂

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